Great Acquisition for Dell: Ocarina

Dell, Inc. has signed an agreement to acquire Ocarina Networks. Ocarina’s storage optimization technology – including compression and deduplication – helps customers significantly reduce data management costs and streamline operations.

Ocarina’s groundbreaking content-aware optimization technology enables customers to dramatically reduce storage space requirements and the amount of redundant data. Unstructured data from the Internet, email, and images continues to proliferate in customer environments as retention requirements increase. Optimizing data across the IT environment drives substantial reductions in costs associated with disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and cooling, data center space, and management.

In the ‘Virtual Era,’ Dell continues to drive an open and integrated approach to data management. Ocarina brings a leading deduplication capability to complement Dell’s EqualLogic solutions. Dell’s intent is to drive increased efficiency with a goal of radically reducing data management costs. These savings can help Dell customers make room in their budgets for other strategic investments to help their business succeed.

Ocarina Networks was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in San Jose. Subject to customary closing conditions, Dell expects to complete the acquisition by the end of the month. After closing, Dell plans to maintain and invest in additional engineering and sales capability. There are no plans to move the current operations. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Ocarina provides an important component of our data management portfolio and our EqualLogic ecosystem to provide customers the best value for their IT investments,” said Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president, Enterprise Product Group. “Content-aware deduplication allows us to provide a true global approach to deduplication across the datacenter and has a tremendous ripple effect of cost savings that frees up budgets for strategic investments.”

“This is a great opportunity for the Ocarina technology, and for Ocarina customers and partners. Combining Ocarina’s capability with Dell’s leading storage portfolio, we plan to move the Ocarina solution well beyond what you’ve seen with other deduplication offerings to include ‘end-to-end’ optimization. This brings deduplication to not only primary storage, but also to key storage workflows including backup, replication, migration and tiering,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO, Ocarina Networks.

“As both an Ocarina and Dell customer, we see opportunity for Dell to take a great solution and expand the capabilities for our environment. We manage billions of unique image files, consuming petabytes of storage. Ocarina solutions are reducing our storage footprint by over 40 percent, over and above the existing JPEG compression, which is making a big impact on our storage and networking costs,” says James Goss, vice president, Operations, Photobucket. “I’m encouraged to see that Ocarina will now fit into my existing support structure with Dell and run on the same hardware already in my data center. I look forward to seeing how Dell can leverage Ocarina into its existing and future storage products.”